Bayou Artist | Patricia Tait Jones

Article by April C. Doughty
Photography by Kelly Moore Clark

Patricia Tait Jones came to art later in life. She was inspired by the path her daughter Maggie had taken in college and emboldened by the encouragement of a supportive friend who pursued creative study alongside her. What began as a self-directed return to the classroom has now grown into a deeply rooted artistic practice sustained by her involvement in a local artist co-op. For Jones, community is both a catalyst and a companion. She sees clearly how the people around her shape her as an artist and how the arts, in turn, enrich and strengthen the places we call home. Far from viewing the art world as a competitive arena, she embraces it as a landscape of boundless possibility, where growth, exchange, and shared inspiration flourish.

Her decision to pursue art later in life wasn’t entirely unfounded. Although she spent most of her adult years as a special education teacher, Jones had established a foothold in creative work. While her daughter Maggie was studying art at Louisiana Tech University, Jones worked as an accessory designer for the Canadian company Olsen and later in the Dallas apparel market alongside Gavin Smith and other showroom purveyors. “I enjoyed it,” she said, “but it was a lot of pressure.” Still, the experience planted something meaningful in her. “So that’s kind of where I sprang from,” she said.  And as she watched Maggie move through the Tech art curriculum with talent and conviction, Jones felt a pull of her own to explore that world. Speaking of Maggie, Jones said, “She’s like my spirit guide, and to this day, she is such an inspiration to me.” 

Watching Maggie’s growth as an artist revealed aspects of art education that genuinely surprised Jones. “I was really fascinated by the way she learned to have problem solving skills,” she said, which is something Jones hadn’t previously associated with studio work. Jones also found herself drawn to the introspective process Maggie developed and the way each piece evolved through critique, revision, and collaboration. Jones admired the constant cycle of making, receiving guidance, and reimagining. She began to see art making as a process energized by teamwork and feedback that she said “you may not even know you need.” Seeing her daughter grow through the continual challenges and supported reinvention fostered by her professors left a deep impression on Jones. “I watched her,” she said, “and when she graduated, I decided I wanted to go back to school.” Jones said that during the time she and Maggie were studying art, Susanna, her eldest child, observed their art journey and proved to be the strongest and most positive partner they could have.

When Jones made the decision to return to school, she also invited along her close friend and fellow artist Annie Richardson, who already held an art degree from the University of Colorado. Enrolling with Annie added another layer to an already strong support system. The two women shared a sense of purpose as they endeavored to grow as artists. They were also eager to study under a faculty they deeply admired, including Peter Jones, Charlie Meads, and Ed Pinkston, all of whom were approaching retirement. For Jones and Richardson, the chance to learn from these mentors felt urgent. It was an opportunity they didn’t want to miss. Entering the program as nontraditional students shaped their learning journey in memorable ways. “We had that whole experience of being the older students,” Jones said, “and sometimes that was fun, and sometimes it was hard, depending on how people felt about you.” But in the end, the experience was definitely worthwhile. 

OF ALL HER EXPERIENCES AT LOUISIANA TECH, the one that stayed with Jones most powerfully came from Ed Pinkston’s classes. Pinkston required his students to make a sketchbook entry every day. The entries could be written, drawn, or pieced together from scraps, but he expected them to be done. Jones had never kept a daily creative journal before, and the discipline reshaped the way she thought about her own creative process. Looking back on those years of sketchbooks, she said, “If the house caught fire, that’s what I would take with me first.” She learned the reflective power of journaling, and it became a cornerstone of her growth. Because she wasn’t pursuing a degree, she had the freedom to choose whatever courses she felt would nurture her development, and she kept taking classes until she felt her confidence as an artist come into focus. Eventually, she reached a place where she said, “I felt like maybe I was ready to go off on my own.” After substantial instruction, navigating the creative world independently was its own challenge, but one she was finally ready to meet. Still, she said the transition was both exciting and difficult.

Leaving the structure of school behind meant stepping into a kind of freedom that was both exhilarating and disorienting. Jones had spent years in an environment where assignments, critiques, and deadlines provided a natural rhythm to her work. Without that framework, she quickly realized how solitary the life of an artist could feel. As she put it, “I think that being an artist can be a very lonely job.” The quiet of the studio, once a place of exploration, could edge toward isolation without the constant exchange of ideas she had grown accustomed to. She knew she needed conversation, critique, and companionship to keep her practice moving. “You really, really need to get out of the studio,” she said, and she learned that doing so wasn’t a luxury. It was essential.

Critique, especially, became the anchor she missed most. Jones described it as necessary but uncomfortable. “It’s almost like making yourself go to the doctor,” she said. It can be painful but transformative when surrounded by people who understand your history as an artist and can see the trajectory of your growth. Having a trusted group who can tell you the hard truths, respond to your intentions, and help you push your work forward is “priceless,” she said. That’s why she encourages younger artists to seek out connection the moment they leave school. She tells them to go to openings, meet other artists, and build bonds intentionally. In her view, finding, or sometimes creating, your circle is the key to navigating the difficult shift into self-directed work.

Jones considers herself fortunate to have had artist groups to lean on throughout her career. She spent years gathering with creatives like Kit Gilbert and Annie Richardson, as well as others from the Ruston and Louisiana Tech community whose influence has lingered even after they were gone. These groups offered conversation, accountability, and inspiration, which are all things she believes sustain an artist long after the structure of school falls away. “And so the best thing about being in that kind of group is the camaraderie,” she said, “which is just invaluable.” The Ruston arts community has always felt “really special,” she said, and being part of it helped her hold onto the best parts of collaboration while forging an independent path.

As Jones settled into life as a self-directed artist, she sought out new ways to challenge and expand her practice. Travel became one of her most meaningful teachers. She painted landscapes en plein air, often selling those works to help fund the next trip, and she spent a transformative month at the Vermont Studio School immersed in a community of makers. Over time, she felt drawn to introduce more structure, geometry, and abstraction into her work, which led her to search for artists who were doing what she hoped to learn. “I thought, ‘Okay, I’m out of school. Every now and then, I’m going to find somebody that I really like the work they’re doing, and work with them for a while.’ So that was kind of my transition,” she said. That intention led her to seek guidance from collage artist Ken Kewley and from Stuart Shils, who teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Both of these artists were known for transforming landscapes into abstracted visual language, and their influence nudged Jones toward collage and gave her new tools to pursue the evolving direction of her work.

For the past eight years, Jones has found steady support and creative kinship through her membership in an artist co-op called Fringe: An Art Experience. The group of twelve members includes a mix of painters, photographers, ceramicists, and other makers, and it provides the community she relies on to keep evolving as an artist. Fringe also gave Jones a platform to share her most recent exhibition this past September, a deeply personal body of work titled Mrs. Jones. She chose the exhibition’s title, she said, “because it was really personal, and it was about me, and it was about a transitional period in my life.” Much of the work began during an artist residency with the Ross Lynn Foundation in the midst of the COVID pandemic, when solitude and reflection shaped the direction of her art. In these pieces, Jones uses small collages as preliminary design experiments that serve as springboards for the larger paintings that grow from them. Although the practice of using collages for inspiration is widely used, Jones credits Ed Pinkston with introducing her to this way of working. “So that’s kind of where I am now,” she said, “and I’m still kind of mining the gold.”

In her development as an artist, Jones has also come to understand that inspiration often works quietly, revealing its influence only in hindsight. For example, she recently recognized how deeply her mother’s stained-glass practice imprinted itself on her own visual language. “My mother was a stained glass artist,” she said, noting how its vocabulary of shape, light, color, and translucency echoes through her current collage work. “I just realized that not long ago,” she said, “that color and light and shape was there for me from the beginning.” What she once assumed were simply her own artistic inclinations now feel like a continuation of something she grew up watching, an inheritance of form and luminosity that was there long before she knew she would become an artist.

Her ideas about inspiration have shifted over the years as well. She no longer believes that artists must wait for a spark before beginning. Instead, she’s learned that “the inspiration comes after you start working. You can’t turn it on and off like a switch.” Much of what moves her arrives through small surprises—colors, textures, and moments most people overlook. “Randomness and surprise, I think, are a lot of what inspires me,” she said, adding that even something as insignificant as “a little gum wrapper on the sidewalk” can spark an idea if you’re paying attention. She often thinks of Annie Dillard’s writing and the way a single moment in nature caught with the right mindset at the right time can create a sudden feeling of awe or even a sense of the divine. For Jones, inspiration lives in those flashes of noticing, the ones that open a door just wide enough for the work to walk through.

Over time, the accumulation of practice, study, and community gave Jones the confidence to finally claim the word artist for herself. She admits that it didn’t come easily but said, “If you work hard enough, you get to the point where you’re brave enough that if somebody asks you what you do, you can say, ‘I’m an artist.’” For a long time, she couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud, unsure whether she had earned it. Professional recognition helped. Having work in galleries in New Orleans and creating pieces during residencies in Vermont and Philadelphia affirmed that her practice had reached a new level, but the real shift was internal. It was less about talent or external validation and more about identity. “To me, it was actually more about whether I deserved to call myself an artist, to say that this is who I am.” Ultimately, she realized that being an artist meant both dedicating the hours to the work and choosing to stand alongside the community of people who make art their lives.

Jones is the first to say that making art isn’t a consistently graceful or inspired process. Some days the work moves as if guided by its own momentum. She said, “It’s a lot of fun when it comes easy and just falls off the brush,” but more often it doesn’t. Some pieces take months, sometimes getting painted over and reimagined so many times they become almost unrecognizable. She compares the attachment to these long-labored works to motherhood, admitting it can be “pretty hard to be objective about them when you’ve spent so much time with them.” Yet even in the struggle, there are moments when a painting surprises her, when she steps back and thinks, ‘Hey, that’s pretty cool.’ Those moments, when the energy builds and she feels physically swept into the process, are what she calls “a rush,” the kind of immersive, exhausting intensity that makes the hard days worth it.

But she’s equally clear that the other side of artmaking, the less romantic side, must be endured. For every breakthrough, there are long stretches of routine and repetition, tasks that feel more like chores than creativity. “It’s mostly drudgery,” she said, washing brushes, sweeping the studio floor, staring at paintings that aren’t ready to reveal their next step. Yet she believes this mundane persistence is the foundation of the entire practice. “It’s just showing up,” she said. That’s the real secret. It’s about being present in the studio day after day, even when inspiration is nowhere to be found, because showing up is what keeps the door open for inspiration to come in.

Just as community and the world around us provide artists with inspiration, Jones believes deeply in what artists bring to a community. Her perspective is rooted in abundance rather than competition. In her view, more artists, more exhibitions, and more creative organizations only enrich the entire ecosystem. “I think the more you have, the more energy you have and the more customers you’re going to have,” she said. “It just creates, it builds on itself because you can’t build in a vacuum.” She’s never been afraid of overlap or influence. She sees it as an essential part of how artists grow. Borrowing ideas is part of the creative lineage. She said, “It’s just how we build on each other,” but she also believes in honoring those influences and being mindful not to slip into imitation. Respecting the work of others while developing one’s own voice is, to her, a necessary act of both integrity and community care.

And for Jones, the impact of art stretches far beyond the studio. She believes that original artwork has the power to transform the environments we live in. “Having original art in a space makes that space come alive,” she said, noting that nothing else has quite the same presence. Art elevates daily life, she said, and “puts you on another plane,” strengthening the places where people gather, learn, and grow. In the end, her journey from student to self-directed artist and from isolation to community reflects the very relationships she champions: artists shaping their communities and communities shaping their artists. It’s a reciprocal exchange of energy, inspiration, and support, and Jones stands as a testament to what can happen when an artist not only finds their own voice but chooses to share it with the people around them.